Julian Oliver

Julian Oliver is a New Zealander, Critical Engineer and artist based in Berlin. His projects and the occasional paper have been presented at many museums, international electronic-art events and conferences, including the Tate Modern, Transmediale, Ars Electronica, FILE and the Japan Media Arts Festival. Julian's work has received several awards, most notably the Golden Nica at Ars Electronica for 'Newstweek', a collaborative project with studio partner Danja Vasiliev.
Julian has given numerous workshops and master classes in software art, augmented reality, creative hacking, data forensics, computer networking, object-oriented programming for artists, virtual architecture, artistic game-development, information visualisation, UNIX/Linux and open source development practices worldwide. He is a long-time advocate of the use of free software in artistic production, distribution and education.

Panel: Code and Public Space

Geographers Rob Kitchin and Martin Dodge dedicated their most recent book to parsing 'code/spaces', environments where software and the spatiality of everyday life are "produced through one another". While the idea of social programming is not new, interaction designers and urbanists now find themselves in the curious position of being able to inflect the experience of urban space through apps, mapping tools and physical computing. Working on the assumption that defining public space is too important to be left to advertising agencies and/or bureaucrats, this panel will consider how creative technologists can shape discourse about urban experience and representation. Discussion topics will include: augmented reality and smart city rhetoric, media architecture, open data, privacy, intervention and interdisciplinary collaboration.

Session: Keynote - Critical Engineering in a Closed World

Julian will introduce several of his own works, and work made with others, in an effort to outline his shift from Media Artist to that of 'Critical Engineer'.

Newstweek, was recently announced as a winner of the Golden Nica in the Interactive art category of the Prix Ars Electronica 2011... Oliver's artistic practice clearly reflects his hacker and gaming background, playing around and messing with routers, capturing data from open wireless networks, visually augmenting commercial billboards in the cityscape, sonifying Facebook chats, visualizing protocols and otherwise manipulating networks for artistic purposes. - Taina Bucher for FurtherField.org